“Scarcely one in a thousand of its inhabitants knows how to smile,
A homeland’s sorrow has gathered on this handful of land,
Its birds bring longing, its waves carry disappointment away;
Yassıada is a drop of grief in a blue eye.”Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel
(translation from the Turkish)
For quite some time, looking out from the Asian shore of Istanbul, the blinking lights atop tower cranes and the faint silhouette rising in the distance were the only signs of the feverish activity taking place on Yassıada. Because of the island’s distance from the city, however, it was impossible to discern with the naked eye what these shadowy forms actually represented. It was only during Erdoğan’s visit to the island while construction was underway that helicopter footage broadcast on television revealed the scale of the transformation.
The news bulletin in which images of the “new” Yassıada were shown for the first time also produced a memorable live-broadcast mishap. On a news channel whose editorial line had grown increasingly close to the government’s discourse as the business group to which it belonged became involved in projects such as the Galataport tender, Erdoğan declared: “I don’t call it Yassıada; I call it Yaslı Ada,” playing on the similarity between Yassıada, “Flat Island,” and Yaslı Ada, “Mourning Island.” Unaware that her microphone was still live, the anchor responded: “What do you mean, Mourning Island? You’ve destroyed the place!” Her remark went down in broadcasting history as a rather dramatic assessment of the situation.
Approximately two and a half years later, in August 2021, billboards announced that Yassıada, under its new name, the “Island of Democracy and Freedoms,” had opened to visitors as an open-air exhibition incorporating its historic and registered buildings alongside museums, a convention center, hotel, restaurants and works of art.
Given that the island had hosted the trials that ultimately led to the execution of the prime minister and two ministers of the Democratic Party government overthrown by the military coup of 27 May 1960, its transformation into a site of memory was hardly surprising when compared with similar projects undertaken during the AKP era, such as the 15 July Memory Museum and the Panorama 1453 History Museum.
From the outset, however, the decision to make the island serve not only day visitors but also groups seeking facilities for conventions and accommodation became a matter of controversy. Indeed, even before the island opened, Ertuğrul Günay, a former AKP Minister of Culture and the project’s original “intellectual architect,” described the outcome as shameful, arguing that his initial idea of a “Museum of Democracy and Remembrance” had been abandoned and Yassıada had instead been turned into a tourism project. (Cumhuriyet, 29 May 2020)
How, then, can we explain the motivation behind the attempt to “save Yassıada from its isolation”? An island whose very name, Yassı, had been transformed into Yaslı, “mourning,” because of the memories associated with it; an island declared a first-degree protected site in 1976, during the government of the Justice Party, the political successor to the Democratic Party, and subsequently “left to its fate”; an island for which a project was launched in 2011 to transform it into a cautionary site of memory, yet which, when construction began, was heralded by the prime minister of the time as destined to become “Istanbul’s Camp David” (Milliyet, 15 May 2015); and finally, a multifunctional, modified Yassıada opened for operation by the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey through subcontractors under a build-operate-transfer model.
With these questions in mind, I visited the island on 12 September, the anniversary of another military coup, paralleling the island’s own history of the 27 May coup.
First of all, the AKP’s transformation of Yassıada into a site of memory constructed according to its own narrative can be read as an attempt by the party to claim for itself the shared Democratic Party legacy of Turkey’s center-right.
This attempt at appropriation had been articulated before. The myth of the “men of the people,” who emerged from among the nation to challenge the rule of a “narrow, elitist group” at the center and were therefore eliminated, or threatened with elimination, was encapsulated in the slogan “You Hanged Him, You Poisoned Him, We Won’t Let You Devour Him.”
Within this trilogy, Adnan Menderes appears as the first victim of elites alienated from their own people. Turgut Özal, whose death has been alleged not to have resulted from natural causes, occupies the second position. The role of the final potential victim is assumed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has repeatedly declared that he embarked upon this path “wearing his burial shroud.”
This discursive fluidity between the devout “nation” and the leaders who have supposedly devoted themselves, at the risk of their own lives, to the advancement of that nation creates a need for a physical space capable of reformatting memory, allowing identities to merge and become indistinguishable. Establishing the visibility of memory at the very site of victimhood can therefore be understood as highly functional in terms of realpolitik. (Poyraz, 2013, cited in Çınar, 2020)
Sites of memory are designed not simply to recall historical events. They also provide a historical backdrop against which the present can be reconstructed. They stabilize the ways in which societies make sense of themselves and instruct us in what we should remember and how we should remember it. From this perspective, opening Yassıada to visitors as a means of reviving a supposedly “forgotten” memory can be understood as a way for political power to repay its “debt of meaning” by carrying the past into the future. (Çınar, 2020)
The ability of political power to recreate memory is itself a manifestation of that power. Yet the extent to which Yassıada, in its transformed state, is capable of conveying to visitors the sense of mourning necessary for collective memory to be internalized remains highly questionable.
The visit begins in the sports hall where the trials were held. The courtroom has been reconstructed with wax figures representing the judges, soldiers, Adnan Menderes and the other Democratic Party politicians who stood trial alongside him.
In what has effectively become the 27 May Museum, the principal dramatic effect is provided by a roughly half-hour animation reminiscent of Japanese anime, enhanced by visual and sound effects. During each exchange, the relevant wax figure is illuminated, while a voice-over dramatizes the coup and subsequent trial. Visitors seated in the stands of the sports hall are thus invited to witness the judicial proceedings. Perhaps the intention is that, through this experience, they may bear witness to the “truth” endured by the “martyrs of democracy.” (*)
One particularly striking detail in the film is its insistence that, although the decision to execute the defendants was taken by a faction within the coup leadership, both İsmet İnönü and Alparslan Türkeş, himself a member of the junta, opposed the executions. It is noteworthy that considerable care is taken to avoid associating the contemporary CHP and MHP with the coup.
The past is thereby arranged in a manner that preserves room for maneuver in the politics of the present. Perhaps this is also what makes it possible for the leader of the party founded by Colonel Alparslan Türkeş, the officer who read the coup proclamation on the radio, to attend the island’s opening ceremony alongside Erdoğan.
(*) The Turkish words şehit (martyr) and şahit (witness) share the same etymological root, associated with witnessing the Prophet’s miracle and the Supreme Truth. Following the first witnesses, those who endured persecution and sacrificed their lives for their testimony and faith came to embody this relationship between witnessing and martyrdom. Christ, who bore witness to the Truth even at the cost of his life, thus became both the first witness and the first martyr. In later usage, the terms diverged: şehit came to designate one who dies for the faith, while şahit retained the meaning of witness. (Bora, 2015)
After the trial narrative has been presented to visitors, the next stop is the Adnan Menderes Museum. Formerly an officers’ dormitory and later converted into isolation cells, the two-story building presents separate episodes from Menderes’s life and political career in individual rooms, beginning with a replica of his grandmother’s house, where he spent his childhood, and continuing through representations of his inner world during the trial.
Once again, these narratives are supported by wax figures. Yet apparently it was thought that a reconstructed reality would better serve the intended narrative: the actual building in which Adnan Menderes had been imprisoned was demolished (Özlüer, 2016), and his cell was “recreated” in another building.
Finally, at the highest point of the island stands the three-story Museum of Democracy and Freedoms, overlooking an area that has been leveled and transformed into a square. Referring to the word “democracy” in the island’s new name, the museum presents events related to the development of democracy both in Turkey and around the world.
In a separate section entitled “Struggles for Democracy from the Ottoman Empire to the Present,” selected events are presented chronologically, once again through staged scenes incorporating wax figures.
A distinctly pedagogical concern is evident here. Short, condensed accounts of events one might encounter in an average high-school textbook on the history of the Turkish Republic, such as İbrahim Müteferrika’s establishment of a printing press or the dissolution of the final Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, are administered to visitors almost like pills, accompanied by historical reenactments.
The apparent aim is to ensure that visitors acquire at least an encyclopedic understanding of what is meant by the concept of “democracy,” for which, we are repeatedly reminded, “lives have been sacrificed.”
Throughout the museums, this effort to communicate events through hyperrealistic reenactments recalls the painting of Biblical narratives on church walls as a means of rapidly disseminating belief through visual representation in the desired form. (Boynudelik, 2018) As in the 15 July Memory Museum and the Panorama 1453 History Museum, the government’s practice of restoring memory assumes a performative, spectacular and staged character (Bora, 2021), and the museums of Yassıada are no exception.
Alongside the museums, another conspicuous feature is the proliferation of artworks throughout the island. A blog operated by the company handling ticket sales claims that the island, which contains twenty-three installation works on the themes of democracy and justice, has already become one of Istanbul’s cultural destinations. (Özer, 2021)
As with the Yeditepe Biennial, organized under the slogan “You Have an Art,” the government’s struggle for cultural hegemony has extended to the field of contemporary art. Its promise to bring contemporary art “to the people” (Fırat, 2018) also finds expression in the works installed on the island.
Although the artworks take the island’s dramatic history as their subject, they communicate their themes through the most familiar symbols imaginable: a blindfolded woman, a pigeon breaking through iron bars, sheets of writing paper caught on barbed wire.
The preference for recognizable forms requiring little or no mediation does not necessarily arise from negligence or a lack of creativity on the part of the artists. Rather, it appears to reflect an anxiety that “contemporary art” must be presented to visitors in a form that can be immediately understood.
Süreyya Su’s criticism of Ahmet Güneştekin’s Memory Room exhibition in Diyarbakır seems equally applicable here. Although art is employed in an attempt to fill gaps in society’s memory, problems of credibility arising from the aestheticization of the underlying emotion reduce the works to backdrops in front of which visitors pose for photographs. In this form, rather than helping us remember, the works produce an effect that suppresses the pain of remembering. (Su, 2021)
Alongside the artworks, the Fatin Rüştü Zorlu Mosque, one of the island’s symbolic structures, deserves particular attention.
Its sixteenth-century mosque form, monumental in relation to the actual needs of its location, reproduces what has become a hallmark of projects commissioned or undertaken by the government. Placed at the center of the built environment produced by political power, the mosque functions as a founding element of the “nation,” a seal of the “nation’s architecture” (Batuman, 2020), and thus as a manifestation of the government’s visibility and political influence.
The mosque was built in memory of Fatin Rüştü Zorlu, who asked to perform his ablutions and pray two rak’ahs before going to the gallows. In relation to the castle built by Sir Henry Bulwer, the retired British ambassador who purchased the island in the nineteenth century, and to the surviving cells of a Byzantine monastery, the mosque effectively inscribes a new Islamic identity onto the island.
Claims that some of these earlier remains were destroyed during construction may also provide an indication of the intensity of this struggle over memory. (Çınar, op. cit.)
The most controversial place on the island, however, is undoubtedly the five-star Katre Island Hotel, with its 123 rooms, making it the largest building on Yassıada.
On its website, the hotel promises its guests “a unique accommodation experience for the business world” in a location “outside Istanbul yet just as close,” the opportunity to enjoy “the breathtaking view of the Princes’ Islands, away from the hustle and bustle of the city, where life becomes much easier,” and “a romantic dinner at Istanbul Restaurant overlooking the magnificent view of enchanting greenery.”
The façades of the suite rooms facing the roads have been covered with artworks in an apparent attempt to camouflage the accommodation blocks built along the island’s shoreline. Golf carts carrying the belongings of hotel guests are a constant presence.
As visitors walk between rows of luxury suites, looking at them with a mixture of curiosity and envy, the roads eventually lead upward toward the Beacon of Democracy, conceived as a symbol of the passage from darkness into light.
By the end of this short walk, accompanied on sunny days by music from the period broadcast through the island’s closed-circuit sound system, the atmosphere painstakingly constructed at the beginning of the visit has largely dissipated.
Overall, an extraordinary amount has been compressed into an extremely limited space measuring only about 800 meters from one end to the other: a 1,650-square-meter square, a 600-seat convention center, a 123-room convention hotel, a library, an exhibition hall and a 24-meter-high beacon. Every square meter of the island appears to have been exploited for maximum utility.
In Tanıl Bora’s phrase, the “construction lust of Turkish conservatism” manifests itself here once again. (Bora, 2016) Put differently, “the void created through destruction is filled with equal speed by a power incapable of exercising the power to leave space empty.” (Harvey, 2013, cited in Çınar, op. cit.)
How, then, can the insertion of a luxury hotel, itself a capital investment, be explained within a place such as Yassıada, whose symbolic value as an object of emotional investment is so great? (Tokdoğan, 2018)
As is often suggested in relation to the AKP’s construction-oriented projects, should Yassıada in its transformed state simply be understood as a rent-seeking development project, concerned primarily with the commodification of space?
Perhaps the first question that needs to be asked is whether the island actually possesses the potential to be economically “viable” in the first place.
The financial rationale behind such a large hotel investment on an island with a limited tourist season, relatively few visitors and difficult transportation links is open to question. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, the profit or loss generated by the construction and operation of an expensive facility such as a hotel would primarily concern its investor.
When the subject is a major construction project realized through political power, however, it becomes virtually impossible, within the wider network of economic and political relationships, to determine which actor benefits from which project and by how much. In other words, it is impossible today to know how much of any potential loss generated by the investment on the island might ultimately be transferred to the public, or through which mechanisms.
At the same time, there can be little doubt that the presence of a five-star hotel, a structure immediately associated with luxury, comfort and leisure, detracts from the authenticity of the sense of mourning intended to be inscribed into collective memory.
In the marketing of places, an attempt is often made to create a market around the uniqueness and authenticity of a particular location. Yet as that location becomes marketable, and as a market forms around it, it begins to lose precisely that uniqueness and authenticity.
This process, described as “Disneyfication,” involves the presentation of sanitized spaces in standardized formats, in which everything that gives a place its meaning but might generate negative associations for visitors is either removed or domesticated. (Harvey, cited in Çınar, op. cit.)
In its present form, Yassıada struggles to become anything more than a themed holiday resort.
Following the idea, originating with Menderes and perpetuated within the discourse of Turkey’s center-right, that the principal engine of civilization is the desire for prosperity and enrichment (Bora, op. cit.), the once-deserted Yassıada has apparently been rescued from its mourning and, in this sense, finally received its share of “civilization.”
Whether this intervention constitutes a tribute to Menderes’s memory or an insult to it is perhaps a question that conservatives themselves need to debate.
References
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